How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting

dominique_cimafranca writes "Forbes columnist Dan Woods describes a change in the way some companies handle meetings. Owing to instant messaging and younger tech-savvy CEOs, meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week. Woods proposes ways to make this 'meetingless' management effective."

Comments

Actually misguided

[MyLongNickName]

Technology, in and of itself, will not improve meetings. Effective management improves meetings.

Give a group of inefficient people an IM client, and they will be inefficient people IMing all day and interrupting.

I learned a lot about running meetings from effective managers and ineffective ones. My favorite example was a Senior VP for a regional bank. He held monthly meeting with all managers. Each manager was alloted time to speak. But you better damn well have something to say. Most managers passed time off to the next. Only the hihglights that really impacted the group as a whole got shared. Generally 15-20 people invited. Meetings 15-20 minutes. It was effective use of time, effective information. managers could seek each other out if they had other things to discuss.

Want to have good meetings?
* Invite only those that should be there. You don't need 3 marketing guys for your project kickoff meeting
* Above 8 or 9 invitees is a big fat warning sign.
* Have a written agenda. Circulate it beforehand.
* Have a hard end time to meetings. Make it intentionally shorter than it usually would go.
* Make decisions beforehand with the key people. Most decisions don't really get made in the big meeting. Two or three key decision makers on the same page and the rest follow or simply refine the decision.

Re:Actually misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

If your decisions are made before the meeting takes place, don't bother with the meeting. Just dictate whatever you want in an e-mail. Nothing is a bigger time-waster than to go into a meeting where you think you'll have a chance of changing something for the better, only to find out that the office shmooze has already ganged up with the usual crowd to make sure things go for the worse.

Re:What is a meeting for?

[Nerdfest]

There are better tools than meetings to do 1, and maybe even 2.

no chairs at meetings

[peter303]

Best idea from Extreme Programming

"Whom" called - it wants its proper usage back

[Anonymous Coward]

"Whom" refers to the object.

"Who" refers to the subject.

"People who transfer."

"People to whom a transfer is made."

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[vertinox]

Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.

Excessive meetings tend to be the symptom of an improperly managed business.